Til K WE A E T11 OK NATIONS.

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tice Hale, who wrote in the time of Charles II . computes thenecessary expense of a labourer’s family, consisting' of sixpersons, the father and mother, two children able to dosomething, and two not able, at ten shillings a week, ortwenty-six pounds a year. If they cannot earn this by theirlabour, they must make it up, he supposes, either by beggingor stealing. He appears to have inquired very carefully intothis subject.* In 1688, Mr. Gregory King, whose skill inpolitical arithmetic is so much extolled by Doctor Davenant,computed the ordinary income of labourers and out-servantsto be fifteen pounds a year to a family, which he supposedto consist, one with another, of three and a half persons.His calculation, therefore, though different in appearance,corresponds very nearly at bottom with that of Judge Hale.Both suppose the weekly expense of such families to beabout twenty-pence a head. Both the pecuniary income andexpense of such families have increased considerably sincethat time through the greater part of the kingdom ; in someplaces more, and in some less; though perhaps scarce anywhere so much as some exaggerated accounts of the presentwages of labour have lately represented them to the public.The price of labour, it must be observed, cannot be ascer-tained very accurately any where, different prices being oftenpaid at the same place, and for the same sort of labour, notonly according to the different abilities of the workmen, butaccording to the easiness or hardness of the masters. Wherewages are not regulated by law, all that we can pretend todetermine is what are the most usual; and experience seemsto shew that law can never regulate them properly, thoughit has often pretended to do so.

The real recompense ot labour, the real quantity of the ne-cessaries and conveniencies of life which it can procure tothe labourer, has, during the course of the present century,increased perhaps in a still greater proportion than its moneyprice. Not only grain has become somewhat cheaper, butmany other things from which the industrious poor derive anagreeable and wholesome variety of food have become a greatdeal cheaper. Potatoes, for example, do not at present,through the greater part of the kingdom, cost half the pricewhich they used to do thirty or forty years ago. The samething may be said of turnips, carrots, cabbages; things which

* Sec his scheme for the maintenance of the poor, in Burn's History of the Poor Laws.